After having an unpleasant interaction with the horned man on the street, Robin sits down on the steps of a church, resigning himself to waiting there for Major Molineux to pass by. In this moment, the narrator uses imagery and a personification to capture the sounds of the town:
Then he strove to speed away the time, by listening to a murmur, which swept continually along the street, yet was scarcely audible, except to an unaccustomed ear like his; it was a low, dull, dreamy sound, compounded of many noises, each of which was at too great a distance to be separately heard. Robin marvelled at this snore of a sleeping town, and marvelled more, whenever its continuity was broken, by now and then a distant shout, apparently loud where it originated.
The imagery here engages readers’ sense of hearing via descriptions of a “scarcely audible” murmur that is “low, dull, dreamy,” and seemingly “compounded of many noises,” broken up now and then by “a distant shout.” The personification—in which the town is presented as “sleeping” and “snor[ing]”—helps readers to experience the low murmur as a sort of sonorous snore.
Overall, this passage presents readers with a moment of calm before the storm—little does Robin know that the “low murmur” is not a gentle snoring but the sounds of the townspeople preparing to tar and feather Major Molineux and then fiendishly parade him through the streets. Robin’s naïve interpretation of the sounds signals his innocence, an innocence which will be gone once he witnesses the sort of violence the townspeople are capable of.
When describing the horned man’s appearance during the frightening parade, the narrator uses an explicit personification, referring to the man as “war personified,” as seen in the following passage:
The single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing a drawn sword, rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce and variegated countenance, appeared like war personified; the red of one cheek was an emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning which attends them.
As the narrator states, the reason that the horned man is like “war personified” is because the two colors of his cheeks symbolize two major aspects of war—the red is “an emblem of fire and sword” (or battle) and the black is “the mourning” that comes after battle (due to the large-scale loss of life). In addition to these more symbolic elements, the man is also wearing a military uniform, sitting on a horse, and “bearing a drawn sword,” all of which indicate war and battle.
In this moment, the horned man symbolizes the evil of the devil (with his horns and red and black coloring) as well as the chaos of the American revolutionary struggle. Here Hawthorne connects the two, implying that, in the frenzied push for liberation from British colonial forces, American colonists lost their integrity and gave into the sinfulness of mob rule.
